Printing diagrams with eaDocX

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Category: Blog Articles

eaDocX will print EA diagrams whenever they appear in a package, plus all the rest of the package contents, all under the same word heading - this is the default setting, independent of whether or not the diagram and package contents are related.  This means that EA diagrams can now be created to enable very specific document structures.

For example, suppose you are documenting some new aspect of the company technical architecture. You may have some existing components which have already been defined, possibly in another part of the model to which you have read-only access. You want the descriptions of those to appear in your document, alongside your new components.

So, simply drag the existing components into a diagram, and right-click on the diagram. This gives some new options:

• Normal - this just prints the diagram in your document, as normal, including your diagram description.  
• Diagram and Contents. This will print the diagram, and the details of all the elements which appear in the diagram, using the element formatting options which are used for the rest of the document.  This allows you to create an EA diagram with elements drawn from many places in your model, but have all the elements printed together, under the diagram.

• Contents not Diagram This is the same as 'Diagram and all contents', except the diagram itself is not printed.

Note that using this feature allows you to gather together in one diagram elements from a range of locations in your model in order to create a bespoke document for specific purposes. For more information see "The Ad-hoc Diagram Approach" in Structuring your Document.

• Exclude Diagram - just don't print the diagram at all.

Note that if the owner of those existing components moves them somewhere else in the model, your diagram will still print correctly, as it’s the contents of the diagram that are printed, regardless of where the elements came from.

We have found that this makes it easy to create documents which are made up from a mixture of existing reference information and newly created content.

Printing Sequence diagrams

When printing Sequence diagrams, one common requirement is to list out all the messages in the diagram. You can do this by:

• Rather than printing the document in the normal way, choose either the "Diagram and Contents" or "Contents not Diagram" options. This will print all the elements in the diagram, including - only for sequence diagrams - the messages.

• Define some formatting for the Message element type, by adding it in the Profile tab.  This will allow you to print the sequence number of the message, name & description, the name of the object from which the message comes, the destination object, and the parameters and arguments for the message.